Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Our kitchen garden is located on the south side of our house. Last year, we covered the lawn with raised beds and gravel paths. We designed an area for sitting in the middle of the garden. Our property slopes down to a low retaining wall, so we built two terraced beds into the slope. We also planted fruit trees and strawberries on the slope.

The view looking East.

Cabbage Patch

Young Cabbages are protected from hungry birds in chicken wire domes.

Baby Beets

We have a large parking strip and wanted to utilize it for vegetables. We didn't want to buy lumber for beds, so we cut the sod into squares to stack for the walls.

Onions- Yellow, Red, and Walla Walla

Kale- leftover from Fall

Potatoes are coming up- we planted Red, Yukon Gold, Blue, and Russets

Peach Blossom

On the north side of our house we planted Raspberries to complement the existing Blackberries.

Blueberry Blossoms

Our garden as grown substantially over the past four years. We started small with just two raised beds that gave us about 75 square feet of vegetable garden. It was a good start, but too small to grow everything we wanted to try.

Last Spring we did the huge expansion getting rid of most of the lawn and taking over the parking strip. Now we have about 600 square feet to grow vegetables in. In addition to our raised beds we planted 5 fruit trees and strawberries into the landscape. We have another 60 square feet for blackberries, blueberries and raspberries. Also, tucked along our retaining wall are herbs like thyme and rosemary and just recently I planted two grape vines and a dwarf kiwi vine.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

The past several years we have been transforming our Tacoma yard into a large kitchen garden or edible oasis. Some of you may have followed our progress on our home remodel blog which had increasingly become focused more on our garden as we've become more passionate about growing our own food.

I finally decided to start a dedicated kitchen garden blog to chronicle our adventures in growing.

The preparations for Spring growing started for us early in February as we wanted to take advantage of our mild el nino weather. Over the next week or so I'll catch you up on what we've done already and introduce you to our garden.

About Me

I've worn many hats in the landscape horticulture industry doing everything from garden maintenance, container gardening, nursery sales, to garden design.
I'm passionate about small urban gardens and edible gardens.
My husband's stomach has played a great part in cultivating my interest in kitchen gardening. A good Southern boy, who considers himself an urban farmer, he has a passion for all things edible and has strong building, shoveling, and pest squishing skills... great assets in this endeavor.